Multilingual PHP Inline Replacement in HTML ([en]…[/en] etc.)

I am a coding beginner and have my PHP/HTML web project in German. Now I want to make it available in English in the easiest way. I don’t want to add other languages in the future, so I want to try it in the easiest (and maybe not the most proper) way.

I have PHP files with HTML content and the selected language available in a var, i.e.:

<?php
$lang = "en";
?> 

<h1>Title in German</h1>

So all the German words are inline HTML. My idea was to create something like:

<h1>[de]Title in German[/de][en]Title in English[/en]</h1>

But I have no idea how to replace it on every load in a smart way. So it is more a topic on “live replacement”.

Working with constants in an external language file is of course also an option, like all the other options to make a multilingual site I found on Stackoverflow.

But maybe there is a “quick and dirty” possibility option like the one I mentioned?

Thank you for every hint!

Answer

You could try and do this will almost only HTML and CSS. You would need to add this at the top of your page:

<?php

$pageLanguage = "en";

function getLanguageStyle($showLanguage)
{ 
   global $pageLanguage;
   $display = ($showLanguage == $pageLanguage ? 'inline' : 'none');
   return "  span.$showLanguage { display: $display }n";         
}

echo "<style>n".
     getLanguageStyle('en').
     getLanguageStyle('de').
     "</style>n";

?> 

It sets up a style for each language, which you can then use like this:

<h1><span class="de">Title in German</span><span class="en">Title in English</span></h1>

The advantage here is that you don’t need to mix HTML and PHP. This is not a normal way of doing this, but it will work. On very complex pages, where these styles are applied after the first render, this might not be pleasant for your visitors.